Fuck ICE Is Not an Immigration Policy

It’s an earring. It’s a bumper sticker. America needs something better.

I’m an immigrant married to an immigrant, and some of my earliest memories of America are tied to immigration and citizenship.

I remember when Ronald Reagan was shot. We had only recently gotten our green cards, and even as a kid I understood what those cards meant. We could stay. America was becoming home.

Then, in 1986, my father became an American citizen, and so did I. I was eleven.

I remember Mrs. Palmer’s chorus class around that time and singing “God Bless the U.S.A.” My father produced Chuck Norris movies, so I grew up with a particularly unsubtle version of 1980s America around me. Reagan, action movies, Lee Greenwood. I wasn’t thinking about immigration policy. I was a kid. But I understood that becoming American mattered.

This was no longer simply the country my family had moved to. It was my country.

I have also experienced immigration from the other side. I lived and worked in China. I lived and studied in the United Kingdom, where after a certain amount of time I had to register with the police as a foreign national. I know what it feels like to live somewhere that is not your country, to be welcomed while also understanding that your presence is governed by somebody else’s laws. You have a status. There are rules attached to it.

I didn’t experience that as hostility. I was living in another country, and that country had rules.

I grew up among immigrants. I live among immigrants. I married one. I have been the immigrant who became a citizen, the foreign worker, the foreign student, the employer, and the American trying to understand what our own immigration system is supposed to accomplish.

Immigration has never been an abstraction to me, which is probably why I find the immigration politics of both red and blue America so frustrating.

One side too often talks about immigrants as a problem America needs to remove. The other sometimes talks as though immigration enforcement is the problem America needs to remove.

Neither describes the country I know.

A country worth immigrating to also has to remain a country capable of governing itself. That includes its borders.

The Earrings

At the first public, in person event of my campaign for Congress, I found myself standing in a stranger’s living room in Los Angeles. The house was packed, maybe sixty people, almost all strangers to me, and I was nervous.

Until then, campaigning had mostly meant Zoom, social media, phone calls, and conversations with people I knew. Now I had to stand in somebody else’s living room and explain why these people should consider sending me to Congress.

Just before I spoke, the hostess’s son graciously straightened my tie.

Then I noticed the earrings.

“FUCK ICE.”

They didn’t offend me, but I remembered them because “Fuck ICE Is Not an Immigration Policy.”

It’s an earring. It’s a bumper sticker. It tells me what you oppose, but it doesn’t tell me who should be admitted to the United States, how asylum should work, who should be deported and who should not, what happens to someone who has lived here peacefully for twenty years, what workers our economy needs, how employers should be held accountable, or how we maintain a secure border while remaining a country people still want to come to.

The bumper stickers on the right don’t answer those questions either.

Immigrants deserve something better than being romanticized by one side and demonized by the other. Americans deserve something better too.

We need an actual policy.

The People in the Shadows

In California, immigration isn’t theoretical.

I know a Guatemalan nanny who spends five days a week living with the family she works for in the Valley, then sleeps on her daughter’s couch on her days off because she doesn’t really have a home of her own.

I know the Mongolian guy parking cars on La Cienega Boulevard.

And I know people whose immigration status you would never guess unless they trusted you enough to tell you.

Some of these people I love. Others I consider friends. They are talented, hardworking, complicated human beings. Some have degrees. Some don’t. Some own businesses. Some work for cash. Some have been here for decades. Some have immigration situations complicated enough that our usual political vocabulary barely describes them.

An entire shadow economy exists around people like this. Cash jobs, informal arrangements, someone else signing a lease, someone else putting something in their name, people improvising around systems they cannot fully enter.

Undocumented immigrants are not simply outside the tax system either. They pay sales and other consumption taxes, and many pay payroll and income taxes as well. But a large informal economy still exists, and leaving people there is bad for everyone.

Workers are easier to exploit. Businesses following the rules compete against businesses that do not. Governments lose revenue. Talent gets wasted. Families live with uncertainty.

The shadow economy is not compassion.

It is evidence of a system that does not work.

Making Distinctions

Some people I know have complicated histories. I know people who did bad things years ago and found the church. I know people who did bad things and found the synagogue. I know people whose lives cannot fairly be reduced to the worst thing they ever did.

I also believe some people should be deported.

Someone who presents a serious danger today is not the same as someone who made a mistake fifteen years ago, paid for it, changed his life, raised a family, and became part of a community. A violent criminal is not the same enforcement priority as a mother who has lived here peacefully for fifteen years.

Making distinctions isn’t weakness. It’s what governing is.

That principle should run through the entire immigration system.

A Broken System Sends the Bill Somewhere

There is no version of immigration policy in which doing nothing costs nothing.

When someone lives here but cannot obtain ordinary healthcare, the need for healthcare does not disappear. It can end up in an emergency room, where care is far more expensive and capacity is limited.

When someone cannot work legally, the work does not necessarily disappear. It can move into cash, where taxes are harder to collect, wages are easier to suppress, and exploitation is easier to hide.

When someone cannot participate normally in the housing market, the need for housing does not disappear. People double up, sleep on couches, crowd into apartments, or depend on somebody else to sign for them.

When immigration increases population faster than communities add classrooms, housing, healthcare capacity, transportation, and infrastructure, those costs do not disappear either. They are absorbed by cities, states, taxpayers, families, and the immigrants themselves.

And when legal pathways fail while demand to enter America remains enormous, that demand does not disappear. Smugglers, traffickers, and criminal organizations find a market.

A broken immigration system does not eliminate costs. It moves them around, often into the most expensive and least efficient places possible.

That is why this debate cannot be reduced to whether immigration is good or bad. The relevant question is whether our immigration system is making the country stronger or forcing communities and immigrants to absorb the costs of Washington’s inability to govern.

Secure the Border

America should control its borders. That should not be controversial.

A humane immigration system cannot surrender control of entry to smugglers, traffickers, or criminal organizations. Human trafficking is not compassion, and neither is allowing desperate people to believe their best route to America runs through someone who profits from getting them across the border illegally.

Border security requires personnel, technology, intelligence, screening, functioning ports of entry, and enough processing capacity to know who is entering the country and make timely decisions about who has a legal right to remain.

I’m an immigrant, and I want a secure border. There is no contradiction there.

In fact, I think public confidence in border security is necessary if we want Americans to support an ambitious legal immigration system.

Fix Asylum and Prioritize Enforcement

Due process should mean a fair process, not an endless one.

We need enough immigration judges, asylum officers, and processing capacity to decide cases quickly and fairly. If someone qualifies for protection under American law, protect them. If someone does not qualify after receiving due process, there has to be an enforceable conclusion.

Enforcement should also reflect actual priorities.

Violent criminals, gang members, traffickers, and genuine security threats should be at the front of the line. Local law enforcement should be able to cooperate with federal authorities when someone in custody presents a serious public safety threat.

But an undocumented woman should also be able to call 911 when her partner beats her without wondering whether asking the police for help will lead to her deportation. A witness should be able to report a shooting, and a worker should be able to report exploitation.

Public safety requires enforcement, but it also requires trust. We should be capable of both.

Make Legal Immigration Work

America spends enormous political energy arguing about illegal immigration while maintaining a legal immigration system that can be maddening for people trying to follow the rules.

Instead of endlessly debating whether immigration is good or bad, we should ask a more useful question.

What immigration does America need to win?

We need scientists, engineers, doctors, researchers, entrepreneurs, and skilled workers. We also need construction workers, caregivers, agricultural workers, hospitality workers, and people in industries where genuine labor shortages exist.

California should be especially aggressive about this.

The next great AI company should be built here. The next semiconductor breakthrough should happen here. The same goes for biotech, aerospace, robotics, advanced manufacturing, energy, and whatever technology comes after the things we are talking about today.

Silicon Valley became Silicon Valley in part because talented and ambitious people from around the world came here to study, work, invent, invest, and build.

We should be competing for the next generation of them.

Immigration should be one of America’s great competitive advantages. We should use it that way.

Make legal immigration easier to navigate and illegal immigration harder to exploit.

Use carrots and sticks.

Create attractive legal pathways for the people and skills America actually needs, and make following those pathways a much better proposition than entering or remaining outside the system.

Bring People Out of the Shadows

Then we have to deal with the country that actually exists.

Millions of people without permanent legal status already live here. Some arrived recently. Others have been here for decades. They work, raise children, start businesses, pay taxes, rent homes, worship, and participate in communities.

Pretending they are all going to disappear isn’t a policy.

Pretending their legal status doesn’t matter isn’t one either.

For long term residents who have committed no serious crimes, Congress should create a rigorous earned legal status. Come forward, pass a background check, pay taxes owed and a penalty, maintain a clean record, learn English, meet clear requirements, and earn legal status.

Dreamers deserve certainty too. People brought here as children should not spend their adult lives depending on which president is in office or which lawsuit happens to be pending.

Employers need accountability as well. A serious immigration system cannot focus exclusively on the person working without authorization while ignoring businesses that knowingly hire unauthorized workers because they are cheaper, more vulnerable, or less likely to complain.

Enforce employment laws. Protect workers from exploitation. Bring more work onto payroll. Get taxes paid. Let legitimate businesses compete under the same rules.

The goal should not be to tolerate the shadows. It should be to shrink them.

Immigration Has to Work Economically

Immigration is not automatically good for every worker, city, or economy at every level and at every moment.

It depends on who comes, how many people come, what skills are needed, where people settle, whether housing exists, whether infrastructure can accommodate growth, and whether employers are filling genuine shortages or simply looking for cheaper labor.

Those are legitimate policy questions.

California should understand this better than anyone because immigration policy cannot be separated from housing, wages, healthcare, schools, transportation, infrastructure, and economic growth.

The nanny caring for somebody else’s children while effectively having no home of her own is not evidence of a system working particularly well.

Having work is not the same as being able to build a life.

Nor should Washington make immigration decisions while pretending the consequences for states and cities are somebody else’s problem. If federal policy adds population to a community, the capacity of that community to provide housing, classrooms, healthcare, transportation, and public safety belongs in the conversation.

Immigration should expand America’s productive capacity faster than it expands the burdens communities are asked to carry.

That is how immigration helps us win.

Why Congress Won’t Do It

Congress has known for decades that the immigration system is broken.

Unlike some problems in Washington, I don’t think the primary explanation is corruption. There are organized interests on every side of immigration, but there is no single lobby that can manufacture the political courage required to solve the whole problem.

The obstacle is leadership.

Immigration exposes a divide between two Americas.

One America looks at the border and sees disorder, competition for resources, and a government unwilling to enforce its own rules. Another sees families, workers, refugees, Dreamers, and people trying to build better lives, and fears what aggressive enforcement can do to them.

Both are seeing something real.

The problem is that politicians can win primaries by speaking only to one of those realities.

Actual immigration reform requires telling your own side something it does not want to hear.

Democrats have to be willing to say that borders matter, enforcement is legitimate, capacity is finite, and not everyone who enters the country gets to stay.

Republicans have to be willing to say that mass deportation is neither a serious economic plan nor a reasonable answer for millions of long term residents, that America benefits enormously from immigration, and that legal pathways should be expanded when they serve the national interest.

That is harder than wearing the earring.

It is harder than chanting the slogan.

It is also the job.

The California Compromise

I don’t pretend to have solved every immigration question in one essay.

But California is a useful place to start.

Call it The California Compromise.

The premise is straightforward: secure the border while opening a better legal front door.

Control entry into the country, attack trafficking and smuggling networks, resolve asylum claims quickly, and prioritize dangerous offenders and genuine security threats for removal.

At the same time, build a legal immigration system designed around American economic interests. Compete for global talent. Create legal pathways for genuine labor needs. Give Dreamers certainty. Create earned legal status for long term residents who meet demanding requirements. Enforce employment law against employers as well as workers. Bring people out of the shadow economy and into the legal economy.

And plan for growth instead of pretending growth is free.

Housing, schools, hospitals, transportation, water, energy, and public safety are part of immigration policy because immigrants, like everyone else, need places to live and functioning communities to live in.

The test should not be whether a policy sounds sufficiently compassionate to the left or sufficiently tough to the right.

The test should be whether it makes America stronger.

Does it increase economic growth and strengthen the tax base? Does it improve security and public confidence in the law? Does it protect American and immigrant workers from exploitation? Does it attract people who can help us build the industries, businesses, homes, infrastructure, and technologies we need? Does it reduce the shadow economy rather than expand it?

We should use carrots and sticks because both matter.

We should use immigration to win.

Becoming American

I remember my father becoming an American citizen, and I remember becoming one myself.

I was eleven.

Citizenship wasn’t simply new paperwork. We were joining something.

I still believe that should mean something on both sides.

America should offer immigrants opportunity, equality before the law, safety, and a genuine chance to belong. Immigrants should be expected to become participants in American life.

Learn English. Understand our institutions and laws. Work, participate, build, raise a family, and become part of a community.

Keep the food, music, traditions, accent, and memories of where you came from.

But become American too.

That is not erasing where someone came from. I certainly haven’t erased where I came from.

It is adding something.

Something Better Than Red or Blue

I’m a Democrat, but immigration is one issue where I have little interest in grading presidents according to party.

Democratic and Republican administrations have spent decades changing enforcement priorities, creating temporary programs, reversing previous policies, fighting in court, and asking executive power to compensate for Congress’s inability to reach a durable agreement.

Barack Obama deserves credit for acting on Dreamers. I worked on both of his presidential campaigns, and I believed deeply in what his election represented.

Looking back, DACA also illustrates one of my frustrations with Obama. He had the courage to act, but executive action could never substitute for a durable political settlement. A protection created by one administration can be challenged, changed, or reversed by another.

Some of the things Obama was criticized for now look absurd.

I’m not talking about the tan suit.

I’m talking about the missed opportunities to build things that lasted.

Immigration is one of them.

At some point, Congress has to make a deal that can survive the next election.

Not a Democratic immigration system that lasts until Republicans win, or a Republican immigration system that lasts until Democrats win.

We need something durable enough that Americans believe the border is real, immigrants believe the legal system is worth using, employers know the rules, Dreamers know where they stand, communities can plan for growth, and long term residents know whether there is a legitimate path out of the shadows.

That is what the California Compromise is trying to do.

Political slogans are very good at telling us which team someone belongs to.

They are terrible at governing a country.

“Fuck ICE Is Not an Immigration Policy.”

Neither is “deport them all.”

We can secure the border while opening a better legal front door. We can bring qualifying people out of the shadows while removing people who genuinely threaten public safety. We can protect workers, enforce the rules, plan for the real costs of growth, compete for the talent America needs, and make citizenship mean something.

That isn’t splitting the difference.

It is trying to win.

Call it The California Compromise.

Build it here.

Then sell it to America.

Author’s Note

This essay started with a memory from the first public, in person event of my congressional campaign and a pair of “Fuck ICE” earrings I saw in that room.

It isn’t about the woman wearing them. She and the people in that home welcomed me.

The earrings stayed with me because they captured how much of our immigration debate has become a declaration of which side we’re on rather than a discussion of what actually works.

I’ve experienced immigration as an immigrant who became an American citizen, as a foreign student and worker living abroad, as the husband of an immigrant, as a business owner, and as someone who has spent most of his life around immigrants from all over the world.

I don’t want an immigration policy designed to satisfy either tribe.

I want one designed to work.

About the Author

Dory Benami is an Israeli born American small business owner, community organizer, and former Democratic candidate for Congress in California’s 32nd Congressional District. He immigrated to the United States as a child and became an American citizen at eleven.

The son of a film producer whose work included Chuck Norris movies, he grew up in Los Angeles and later lived, studied, and worked abroad before building a career spanning entertainment, international trade, entrepreneurship, political campaigns, and community advocacy.

He writes about American politics, Israel, immigration, and the territory between ideological extremes.

He lives in Los Angeles with his wife and daughter.